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Virtual worlds metrics gurus, Kzero, have done some further hypothesising on the growth of the kids market for virtual worlds in the next year or two.
If the prediction of 110 million kids using virtual worlds by 2010 is close to the mark, even the most cynical corporates are going to start taking notice. Take Hello Kitty as an example. That one brand is likely to draw an enormous following if their latest trailer is anything to go by:
Image courtesy of Rik Panganiban
The Second Life Education Community Convention (SLEDcc) ran in Tampa, Florida, over the last weekend. Presented here are wrap-ups of three keynote speeches given over the course of the weekend, each with a different focus on the issues facing education in virtual environments.
Why Second Life Can’t Tip: The Power and Perils of Living La Vida Ludic
Presenter: Barry Joseph (GlobalKids Bixby in Second Life)
Barry Joseph is of the opinion that until society becomes more familiar with integrating play into every day life (the “ludic” life), Second Life will not tip.
The word ludic holds its roots in the Latin ludere, meaning “to play”. It therefore shares a common root with the word ludicrous, meaning “amusing or laughable.” Though ludic started out as a word with meanings relating to aimless play and squandering of time, those meanings have lost their derogatory status, so that in the context of modern education the connotations are far different.
According to Joseph, ludic, in this context, best describes the way in which “game/play dynamics, aesthetics and sensibilities … increasingly define our social interactions.” Thus, the ‘ludic life’ is one in which we bring gaming skills to bear in our everyday lives, rather than one in which we treat life as a game, as in the philosophy of ludism.
Until more people are living the ‘ludic life’, it seems unlikely that Second Life will tip. To date, Second Life has hit a major peak in the rate of people joining up, only to have that rate steeply fall off again; clearly the statistics are showing that Second Life is nowhere near tipping yet. Is this what it will take, for us to nurture our game-playing selves, to create ludic lives for ourselves in the real world, in order to make Second Life more appealing?
Explicit Bargains: Setting Realistic (Yet Powerful) Expectations for Teaching in Virtual Worlds
Presenter: Sarah Robbins (Intellagirl Tully in Second Life).
Sarah Robbins’ keynote speech covered how to increase the effectiveness of in-world education. Borrowing from Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, she presented the following structure:
In essence, “Innovation fails when the bargain breaks down.†However, each part of the structure must be analyzed to ensure that any given educational project goes off well. If the tool is inadequate, the promise is not sufficiently promising, or if the bargain is being consistently broken by one side or the other simply due to circumstance, any one of these can jeopardize the whole project.
Presenter: Beyers Sellers (“Metanomics” presenter).
Beyers Sellers addressed the tricky issue of how to get support (funding, resources and other types of assistance) for educational ventures into virtual environments from faculty and other educational staff.
Essentially you need to demonstrate that you are supporting the goals of the educational facility at which you teach by using virtual environments in your classroom. Without this reassurance, you are unlikely to get the support you require.
Sellers identified these three questions as ones that administrators are likely to want answered:
In conclusion
Second Life could be a promising educational platform under the right circumstances. However, not only does Linden Lab need to make preparations at their end to make the magic happen, there are plenty of opportunities available for educators, and the wider public, to do their bit to support and improve education on the Second Life grids.
When it comes to the use of virtual environments, the healthcare industry is no less prone to fall into marketing pits of doom than any other industry. Static data, presented in a slap-dash fashion like posters on a wall. Huge, unused buildings that serve no particular purpose, and the occasional video. This seems to be the standard fare presented by companies and organisations coming into virtual environments who are not sensible about use of the medium. Often, these folk would have been better served by a well-organised Web page than the mish-mash they present within virtual environments. Indeed, their attempts are distinctly reminiscent of the early days of the Web, before people got a handle on that medium.
It’s not all bad, however. A couple of companies and organisations have produced useful and significant services that are appropriate for virtual environments. They have clearly thought about how best to discharge the services they already provide to demographics containing the folks they previously had a great deal of trouble reaching. People who use virtual environments, and who:
a) are unable or unwilling to leave their homes to obtain health information or care;
b)Â suffer from chronic illnesses that require some maintenance by the patient that can be bolstered by health information or care delivered online;
c) are young, not requiring specific healthcare, but can benefit from information delivery.
One of the best efforts open to the public eye is Palomar West hospital, a venture by Cisco, Palomar Pomerado Health, and metaverse developers Millions-of-us. The Second Life version of the hospital, built before the real version, is an exact model of what you can expect to see in San Diego in 2011, to the extent that several rooms are fully kitted-out with the sort of equipment that will fill the real thing. The Second Life exhibit is quite interactive, and provides an excellent idea of how things might operate in reality. Cisco Systems will power the real hospital. A central, internal network will be created to support the operation of the hospital, from patient locations via RFID tags, to room temperature and lighting via bedside screens, to the robotic technology that enables surgeons to operate remotely and automated systems for diagnostic work. Incidently, when we wandered past the site to take a closer look, a research study was being conducted. It’s good to know that this virtual environment replica is useful not only for future patients, and public healthcare at that level of education, but also for medical and other professionals.
Another ongoing project that has proved to be successful is one put on by the CDC in Whyville. Whyville is a virtual scientific learning environment for kids aged 8 to 15 years old. During the influenza season in the real world, Whyvillians are also placed at risk of developing the “Why-flu”, which causes sneezing and red spots on the avatar’s face. Not only were kids given the chance to have their avatar inoculated prior to the Why-flu season beginning, during the season those who caught the flu had a chance to buy remedies from the pharmacy, which were time-limited, and which came at a cost. During the second round of the project in 2007-2008, Whyvillians were encouraged to invite their grandparents to come and be virtually inoculated also. Thus information was disseminated across several generations online, and no doubt further than that offline, to other family members, and from there into the wider population.
This year the CDC has teamed up with CIGNA to produce a healthcare island in Second Life.
“About 90% of what we’re doing with chronic disease management involves behavior change. We could do more for our patients who have diabetes, weight problems or hypertension by helping them relieve their stress and achieve better mental health.” This is what they hope to cover in the virtual environment.
We are yet to experience the island for ourselves, however given the success of the Whyville project, it seems that the CDC have an excellent idea of what it takes to sell healthcare information to the younger generation; it will be interesting to see what tack they take for older folk. Most people like to take their medicinal information with a spoonful of sugar – experience will tell whether games will be the sweetener required, or whether talks and general social interaction are the preferential nectar.
Another site of note: the Second Health hospital or Polyclinic, Second Health London in Second Life. In a similar fashion to the West Palomar site (though in less detail), the Polyclinic displays a 3D representation as it might exist in real life. The establishment can be toured, though perhaps the machinima made at the site in Second Life, with accompanying information, is more enlightening. Though an entire medical campus has been built, with signs denoting the areas in which GPs and specialists will see patients, the acute care clinic and diagnostic facilities, none of the detail of equipment or functioning of the clinic has been created.
Yet another fantastic use of virtual environments is exemplified by the folk over at Play2Train. A town and two hospitals have been fitted out to enable “Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), Simple Triage Rapid Transportation (START), Risk Communication and Incident Command System (ICS) Training”.”Play2Train provides opportunities for training through interactive role playing.”
For a quick round up of other nifty virtual doings in healthcare, visit this link.
There is a vast diversity of healthcare information that needs to be delivered, both to professionals and to the general public. Virtual environments may only slowly be coming into their own in this realm, however, there is hope for them yet.
PacRimX (Pacific Rim Exchange)
Stan Trevena, director of technology for Modesto City Schools, is the man responsible for the PacRimX project, developed in 2007. The idea was that kids from Modesto and their counterparts from Kyoto Gakuen in Japan would be able to interact with each other in a virtual environment, prior to an international student exchange in which 20 Modesto students traveled to Japan, and vice versa with 50 Japanese students.
Due to time-zone issues, video-conferencing was ruled out as a solution early on. Instead, Trevena bought an private Island on the Teen Second Life Grid. He fitted it with some basics, including a welcome centre, but noted that “a lot of the innovative use of the island will come from the kids.” The number of islands has now expanded to four. Trevena describes the facility as “a place for our students to communicate and collaborate with each other in building a place where they can share their interests, cultures and languages.”
Students from Kyoto arrived in Modesto on June 24, 2008.
Westley Field, Director of Online Learning at MLC School Sydney, founded the Skoolaborate Project in 2007. Skoolaborate works with junior high schools around the globe to foster students collaboration, involving the use of digital technologies: wikis, blogs, virtual environments and other online learning tools. The Skoolaborate learning space, also on the Teen Second Life Grid, is a private, secure area with an invitation required to access it. “Skoolaborate now has 14 schools from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and the USA.”
“In the Global Challenge, teams of US high school students collaborate with international counterparts from October to May to address global climate change and compete for prizes and scholarship awards.”
Approximately 2,000 students have already participated in their program.
Kyoto Gakuen has been working with both Skoolaborate and PacRimX independently since the genesis of each program in 2007. This is how a relationship developed between the directors of the programs, which ultimately led to the merger between the two. The Global Challenge program was brought in separately, to complement the work of the others.
The resulting merged program, featuring input and participation by 17 schools from across the globe, is now the world’s largest virtual environment project, designed for kids of junior high school age.
“Schools collaborate using a variety of online tools and environments to share experiences, thoughts and ideas from around global understanding, social and environmental education.”
Thoughts
Having a private project on the Teen Second Life Grid could have been a great way to ensure that students encountered a slow-moving, sterile environment, with great homogeneity of culture, opinion and thought. However, this partnership should bring together a rich and diverse mix of folks, students and educators, which should create a varied, stimulating environment in which to learn.
Linden Lab is in flux, and the cause is not at all clear: speculation is rife and rumors abound, and the Lab has all but cut off communications with it’s residents. The Millennial Generation does not seem to be the target audience for the Second Life “platform” – this indicates that there is unlikely to be an “Education Grid” any time soon, or perhaps at all. It looks like the program developed by the combined force of PacRimX, Skoolaborate and Global Challenge will be the one of the largest contenders for an alternative.
The question is: will the Teen Second Life Grid remain active for long enough for any of their goals to come to fruition?
Telstra today took the next step in the ongoing evolution of their significant presence in Second Life with the launch of a staffed customer service centre. There’ll be Telstra-employed avatars available between 11am and 10pm Monday to Friday AEST to answer “service-related queries”. Obviously there won’t be too many queries from those whose connection has gone down but it’s a worthy expansion of customer service in-world.
A launch party was held from 5pm today:
There’s plenty of space to wait if it comes to that:
With sixteen sims, Telstra are a corporate behemoth in Second Life and a successful one at that. It’ll be interesting to see how many people utilise the service. The press release states that “this initiative was driven by the popularity of this virtual world with BigPond customers”. We’ve asked for some figures on this – the common assumption behind Telstra’s popularity is that BigPond customers have their Second Life usage unmetered and it’d be good to get some solid figures behind the claim.
The natural reaction from non-Second Life residents would be to ask why you’d bother logging in to ask a question when it’s easier to phone or email the query. To some extent this is valid but it misses the point of the exercise (beyond its PR value) – it’s one of the few corporate experiments in actual virtual world customer service. Whether it’s successful is only part of the equation – it’s useful research for the future when virtual worlds more successfully enable business transactions. This sort of exercise is fodder for that future.
The US-based Technology Intelligence Group have released a report titled “Virtual Worlds Industry Outlook 2008-2009”. It’s a really well written document that both looks back at the past year and makes some solid predictions for the coming year.
The standout observation for me is the ‘mainstreaming’ of non-gaming virtual worlds:
Stanford SUMMIT has been leveraging simulations built on the Forterra OLIVE platform to train doctors on key critical thinking skills with trauma patients, 18 of the top 20 educational institutions own land in Second Life with many using it to teach courses, McDonalds has created a Happy Meal virtual world to reinforce their well known brand, and customer and staff meetings are being held by enterprises across multiple platforms.
There’s no doubt that virtual worlds are becoming more mainstream, something that was driven home to me earlier this year when I was asked to consult on a film project (there’ll be more information of that project later this year). The point is, the film in question has a story line with no direct relationship to virtual worlds. One part of the film will feature Second Life – not as a novelty, not in a high-tech context, but in an everyday (rural) life scene. It’s those increasing references in popular culture that will increase the mainstreaming momentum.
The report also states some confidence around the graphics issues besetting virtual worlds:
the current slate of graphics challenges associated with virtual worlds may soon be remembered in the same vein as 64k computers.
If ‘soon’ means in the next year to two years, then there’s another aspect of momentum building because at present the average ADSL broadband customer with a PC older than 18 months or so is still encountering great challenges.
Not surprisingly, the education session is seen as a continuing driver of widespread virtual world adoption:
The training and education market will continue to drive widespread adoption of virtual world technology, as the broad experimentation within Second Life demonstrates. Universities and other teaching institutions that initially experimented with Second Life are in the process of standardizing platforms for virtual classrooms, which will be a boom for companies that are already well positioned in this market, such as Proton Media and Forterra Systems.
The power of virtual world add-ons for traditional websites is emphasised – Google Lively is the high-profile recent example:
The frictionless nature of a ‘go to the meeting room’ button on a web page will lower the barriers to adoption
.
There’s certainly a growing convergence of forces that increase the likelihood of virtual worlds reaching the mainstream. As always, there’ll be plenty of attrition, some conflict and a great deal of uncertainty. In that respect it’s situation normal.
The legal section of the report also makes fascinating reading with a number of precendents only starting to be established. You can view the report in full here.
What are your thoughts – does the report provide any surprises for you?
Upon reading the comments and articles generated by “Students vs Second Life“, I had several prominent thoughts:
Here is a brief wrap-up of what other folks had to say, having read the article:
Kate Amdahl suggests that we create “learning” areas – areas which have pre-generated content, games and interactive mechanisms, to get folks used to the interface and get them spending time in Second Life. From these places, they can make forays out into the rest of the world, and gradually incorporate the overall idea of Second Life into their play-style.
Sabine Reljic seems to indicate that we would be well rewarded by pushing students into Second Life and out of their comfort zones. I wonder what that would look like. Right now, it would seem that pushing students into Second Life and leaving them to their own devices results in them wandering around lost or standing around chatting. This view is supported by the VirtuEd post. Additionally, pushing teens and young adults tends to result in them pushing back – caution is indicated.
Roland Legrand over at Metanomics has written a great post about what the Millennials know about multi-tasking and collaboration that they can teach the rest of us: “we also have an obligation to help them” learn about freeform play.
Over at New World Notes, this post gathered all sorts of interesting comments, and this second post ponders the question of why Habbo Hotel is so popular amongst young Millennials, as opposed to Second Life or Teen Second Life. Of the comments, the most interesting was one which wonders whether Generation X has more of a need to escape into fantasy than the Millennial generation. Did Gen X’ers grow up in a more hostile environment, from which they looked for relief?
At Massively, Tateru Nino states: “Where it might be that they would find additional traction if they could cluster with their cultural peers — members of their own generation — digital avatars consistently thwart the sorts of flocking behaviors. Millennials can’t identify their peers among the avatars of their parents and grandparents’ generations — and for the peer-oriented Millennials, that’s frequently a deal-breaker.” Also, “The very nature of Second Life turns away Millennials in droves. As entertainment, it is as undirected as a public park.”
A study by the University of Leipzig supports the finding that there are few Millennials in Second Life. They state that this is because Second Life is too realistic, and that virtual worlds should be centered around escapism.
All in all, there seems to be a fascinating spectrum and crossover of viewpoints on the topic, many supported by direct, accreted experience and statistical data. Are your own experiences with students in line with one of these, or do you have a unique perspective to share?
I received a press release from the ABC’s Radio National, who have launched collaborative content creation site called Pool.
It’s a joint initiative between RMIT University, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Wollongong and runs on the open source content management system Drupal. The call is on for people to contribute their words, pictures, sounds or video with the ability (via a Creative Commons license) for every participant to download the work of others to build or collaborate on. It’s another plunge into participatory media for the ABC – something that’s been explored in the ABC’s presence in Second Life.
I contacted the ABC to ask about any potential tie-in of the Pool initiative with Second Life and at this stage nothing’s planned in that regard. There seems to be some obvious collaborative opportunities for Pool that involve Second Life, or indeed any virtual world, so here’s hoping for further exploration of that.
One way to drive that exploration would be to join Pool and start contributing material from your virtual world life…
When I started thinking about education in Second Life, and the reactions of students of university/college age to it, I rather naturally turned to think of my own experiences, and of ideas and prejudices I held as a student of approximately the same age. It took me a little time, and the reading of an article by Joe Essid and Lee Carleton, to realize that that particular approach was never going to work. Today’s students are, for the most part, not of my generation (Generation X), which typically includes folks born between 1964 and 1982. Instead, they tend to be those folks born between 1982 and 2002 or thereabouts – the Millennial Generation.
Why make this distinction? Each generation has a tendency to differ greatly from the generation directly preceding it (which is precisely why these otherwise seemingly arbitrary groupings are made). Ideas, political notions, morals and ethics all have a tendency to change, as the younger generation both learns from and rebels against the previous one. As Generation X rebelled against the strictures placed upon the Baby Boomers, so the Millennial Generation rebels in its quiet, refined manner against the excesses of Generation X.
In Second Life, the gap between Generation X and the Millennial Generation comes sharply into focus, in the two ways that I will discuss further:
1. Second Life is primarily filled with Generation X’ers, unintentionally creating a socially unwelcoming environment for Millennials;
2. Generation X’ers know how to play in the freeform manner that Second Life requires, whereas Millennials typically do not display that skill.
First, the social and political atmosphere of Second Life. Statistically, more people from Generation X participate in Second Life than from any other generation. The ramifications of this are two-fold. It’s harder for Millennials to make contact with other Millennials in this scene, since they constitute a minority of the population. Millennials no doubt feel somewhat uncomfortable interacting socially with folk outside their own generation, whether it be because they sense the cultural disconnect between themselves and older folk or for some other reason. Second Life is chock full Generation X’ers, and they have filled it with their own fashion sense, outlooks, learning styles, and politics – what an intimidating world to enter for the Millennials. Generations X’ers are the Millennials’ parents, and also those strangers their parents warned them about. Add to that the fact that the Millennials are much more likely to have many friends with whom they communicate face to face and then organize those friends and their own lives using technological gadgets and the Internet, rather than meeting people over the Internet. Second Life is simply an unfriendly place for you to go, even if you are not a typical, timid Millennial.
Second, Second Life is an environment in which you need to be able to set goals and tasks for yourself in order to get anything out of it – it is a non-directed playground in which to let the imagination run free. The Millennial Generation has not learned to play this way. They are not used to “making their own fun.” Throughout their schooling they have been given regimented tasks, with pre-determined goals; time outside school is often dominated by a flurry of parentally- determined activities. They are more likely to play games that are directed than to come up with their own games – a Millennial is more likely to play Guitar Hero than to spend time noodling about with a guitar.
The Millennial Generation has an overwhelming sense of ‘busyness’ that pervades their lives, so that not only is learning in a directed fashion a habitual thing for them, it’s also a way of doing things more quickly. Targeted exercises speed up the process of transmitting and garnering information. Additionally, students are looking to do close to the minimum of coursework required to pass, in order to spend more time socially with friends, a priority in this generation.
The educator who uses Second Life as a learning tool will be teaching an additional subject – how to play in a freeform way. The concept and practice of freeform or open-ended play was easier for Generation X, in a way – we were rebelling against another world entirely. Difference and imagination was embraced. It was like a little Renaissance. Even though our schooling focused somewhat on directed study, by university age we had hopefully been weaned off it – by the system. The Millennial Generation, however, needs now to be taught to play this way. They need to be drawn out of their risk-averse shells gently – they need to be led, not pushed. They are not bold.
Second Life is a place where the adventurous prosper and creativity is king – and being able to play in an open-ended way is a necessary skill. Educators need to accommodate their students by creating a somewhat directed environment for them to learn in, and then wean them off it and release them into the open.
For further information on this topic, check out “A Playful Pedagogy for Second Life“, Dr Joe Essid and Lee Carleton, 2008, to be published later this year.
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